Sous vide cooking has become increasingly popular also for the “home chef” and more and more equipment becomes available for the private kitchen. The main tool is a heating unit, a container/vessel which can keep a fluid in the container at a constant temperature. Sous-vide cooking imply vacuum-packaging the food (meat, vegetables . . . ) into for instance tight pouches and placing these food items in the fluid where they might stay up to many hours. Since it is important, that the food is heated at quite a constant and precisely defined temperature, one has to make sure that all parts of the pouches with the food inside are heated to this temperature. It is therefore a great advantage that there is sufficient space between two adjacent pouches and between a pouch and the container wall respectively, such that the fluid can circulate freely to distribute the heat. The temperature depends on the food type, but is typically temperature between 50 and 73° Celsius.
A tool to achieve this equally distributed heating is called a rack. Conventional racks are bulky in size and cannot be collapsed to be stored away when not in use, the vacuum packed pouches are not held firmly in place and are sometimes placed horizontally which is not beneficial for natural heat circulation. The space available for the food pouches is typical held constant by separators which cannot be adjusted to fit to the thickness of the food/pouches. Further, the sizes of different containers cannot be used efficiently as the racks are usually square and of fixed size. Many racks cannot be lifted in and out of the container without the risk that food bags fall out of the rack.
The patent document WO 2011/031306 A2 discloses a prior art sous-vide cooking equipment including a rack (page 5).
US2014/0260998A1 describes a liquid-based cooking system for example «sous-vide»-apparatus, which among others comprises a support system in the form of a frame with three separate shelves/separator to hold individual food processing pouches. The support system is adjustable and may be lifted out of and lowered into the heated liquid. The document shows that a separator comprises a side which is inserted into a mounting arrangement of the frame.
From the above it is apparent that there exists a need to overcome the deficiencies of the prior art with a sous-vide cooking rack according to the independent claims of the attached claim set. The dependant claims disclose embodiments of the invention.